Ars Technica review: USB 2.0 Hi-speed Flash drives

Ars Technica takes a look at 8 different USB 2. worthwhile?

Paralyzed by the overwhelming array of USB Flash drives available these days? We have got what you need to ease the confusion. You've seen USB Flash drives. They're small, they dangle around peoples' necks, and people use them to shuttle all kinds of data around just like floppy disks. The big exception is that they hold far more than floppies, they're much faster than floppies, and they don't seem to lose your files like floppies always do.

The latest generation of USB Flash drives utilize solid-state Flash RAM, the faster USB 2.0 standard, and tend to have a minimum storage size of 128MB. Unfortunately, not all USB drives are the same. We acquired 8 drives from many well-known manufacturers and then we compared, contrasted, and tested them in as many ways as we could think of (including building a RAID-0 array out of two of the drives). Needless to say, we were very surprised with the results that we obtained. What we can say for certain is that USB Flash drives are not a commodity. They all have different strengths and weaknesses. While many will meet most of your needs, some will satisfy them much better than others. Read on to find out which ones will most likely suit you best.